Free Randoms by David Liss Page A

for the ride.
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    Through the front viewscreen, I watched as we hurtled toward the sky. Then I turned around and understood just how quicklywe were moving. We were pulling out of the hangar and heading upward, and then the Earth fell behind us like a pebble fired from a slingshot. Literally seconds after we began to ascend, we were in space, by which I mean outer space. I was now a spaceman. An astronaut. At the very least a kid hitching a ride with aliens.
    I was not, however, floating. It really felt no different from being in an airplane. Artificial gravity? It sure seemed like it.
    And the stars! Imagine the clearest, most vivid night sky you have ever seen—the kind you can only find far away from city lights. Now imagine it a hundred times more vivid, with a thousand times more stars—stars almost as thick as the black behind them. Stars of every color, from pinpricks to big, glowing globs. Behind them hung the viscous soup of the Milky Way, bright and brilliant and real.
    Dr. Roop interrupted my awe to hand me a black, shiny rectangular thing about eight inches long and five inches wide. “What’s this?”
    â€œYour data bracelet,” he said. “It wraps around the wrist of your nondominant hand.” He tapped at his own bracelet, and a viewscreen hovered before us, showing an exterior image of our shuttle’s departure. He tapped at a few icons, and a keyboard appeared out of thin air, hovering just before him, in an ergonomically perfect position. It was translucent, made out of what appeared to be blue energy, but it was also real. I reached out and touched it, and it was solid. Not hard, but somehow physical. It responded to my touch, and I could feel a rubbery resistance with the tips of my fingers. Each stroke made a tapping sound, like it was a real keyboard.
    He tapped a few more keys and sped up the image, slowedit down, stopped the frame. Then he tapped some keys and another screen came up, listing a queue of messages. He sent that away and called up another menu, this one of a series of documents. “This device links you to the wider sphere of Confederation knowledge, and will enable you to communicate, conduct research, keep up with current events, access entertainments, whatever you wish.”
    He then tapped at an icon, and the keyboard and screen simply vanished. “You’ll discover its many properties and uses over the next year.” He gently set my bracelet on my wrist, and the two ends banded together, tightly and seamlessly but in no way uncomfortably. He then walked me through the meaning of the most basic icons on it, showing me how to remove it, activate communications, search for data, and so on.
    â€œIn the upper right-hand corner of your heads-up display,” he said, “you’ll find a menu that includes a few tutorials. I suggest you run through the instructions for the data bracelet when you have some quiet time. Generally, we frown on direct cognitive data integration, since we value the learning process, but we make an exception for the data bracelet, since it’s the key to navigating Confederation culture.”
    I checked my HUD and found I could pull down menus just by looking at them. And then, when I wasn’t using the HUD, it vanished.
    There were so many more questions I wanted to ask, but then the shuttle banked sharply, and when I looked at the viewscreen, I was filled with a sense of wonder. There, before us, against the backdrop of black and stars was an actual interstellar spaceship.
    It was really just the shuttle on a larger scale—a huge rectangle, though rounded at the corners, with a pair of massive engines affixed to each side, one at the end and another toward the middle. There were no windows, but the outer hull was made of dark metal, the same near black as the nanite injector. Only the lights, affixed at various intervals, and the yellow glow of the engines made